No longer on the left of your dial: Bill Mandel

Robert Selna, SPECIAL TO THE EXAMINER

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, July 26, 1998

BERKELEY - At age 81, Bill Mandel still has a passion for free speech. And the longtime Berkeley resident says he is willing to go to jail to prove it, to protest a recent injunction closing down Free Radio Berkeley.

On June 16, a federal judge ordered the permanent injunction against the grass-roots 50-watt station because it didn't have a permit from the Federal Communications Commission.

Mandel was brought before the committee at San Francisco's City Hall in 1960 for his radio show, broadcast by KPFA in Berkeley, and his KQED television production about the press and periodicals of the Soviet Union.

By the time Mandel went to testify on May 13, 1960, his TV show had been canceled.

"My producer at KQED said, "Bill, I am not a courageous man. Tomorrow night is your last show,' " Mandel remembers. "When a man tells you he's a coward, you can't argue with him."

A coward Mandel is not. Excerpts from his testimony at the Board of Supervisors chambers are immortalized in films and documentaries, and historians say they are widely considered to have helped launch the student movements of the '60s.

In a famous line, he told committee Chairman Edwind Willis, a congressman from Louisiana, "If you think I'm going to cooperate with this collection of Judases; of men who sit here in violation of the Constitution; if you think I am going to cooperate with you in any way - you are insane!"

KPFA kept him on the air after the committee speech and won the support of UC-Berkeley students organizing the Free Speech Movement in 1964. Mandel was asked to be on the movement's executive committee that same year.

Mandel retired in 1982, after writing several books and translating thousands of journals on Soviet society. He then focused more of his time on KPFA, and began to broadcast a weekly show on Free Radio Berkeley in 1995.

The FCC first requested the injunction against the station and levied a $10,000 fine against founder Stephen Dunifer in 1995, two years after he started broadcasting from an old bathroom in a communal house on Alcatraz Avenue on the North Oakland border.

Dunifer says that the station didn't apply for the license because the commission bans stations under 100 watts. Getting a waiver, he says, would have been practically impossible and prohibitively expensive.

Interference cited&lt;

The commission has granted only two such waivers since the ban began in the late '70s. In court records, the FCC said it prohibited such low-watt broadcasts because it believed they interfered with larger radio signals and emergency communications.

The station's left-leaning and educational programming included broadcasts by groups such as Food Not Bombs, Earth First, Critical Mass and individuals with obscure interests or record collections.

Dunifer has always protested the injunction on the grounds that it violates the First Amendment. He argues that prohibiting low-watt broadcasts allows only those who can afford licensing fees and expensive equipment to have a voice in radio.

"If there is room on the spectrum (radio airwaves), why can't the community use that?" Dunifer asks.

Acquiring an FM license costs $2,470. Other fees are also required depending on the type of equipment, says FCC spokeswoman Sharon Jenkins.

In ordering the injunction, Wilken prohibited anybody who had worked with Dunifer from broadcasting without a license.

Dunifer says besides being shut down, he is equally concerned with the "overly broad" and "chilling effect" of Wilken's decision.

Broadness denied&lt;

The U.S. district attorney's office for the Northern District of California says the ruling against Dunifer is no more broad than usual.

"That is common and standard wording for an injunction," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark St. Angelo. "If the judge doesn't enjoin others, the injunction wouldn't have much meaning - that's what she is concerned with."

Judge Wilken declined to comment on the case.

Mandel, who is enjoined from broadcasting, says he plans to continue his show if arrangements can be made for him to go to jail in lieu of a fine of the type levied on Dunifer. He says that he cannot afford a fine because he and his ailing wife live on a fixed income of social security and savings from his work as a translator of Soviet academic journals.

St. Angelo says that if Mandel begins broadcasting again, he will be in violation of a court order and, therefore, in contempt of court. While he won't speculate about Mandel's fate, St. Angelo points out that contempt of court can result in a fine or jail time.

"This is unusual to say the least," St. Angelo said.

"Jail is a possibility, but I don't think we're talking long-term, as far as I can see."

Mandel is used to such consequences for speaking his mind.

For his writings on Russia, Mandel was hauled before two government subcommittees investigating communism in the United States in the early '50s.

Lifetime of protests&lt;

Protests have also had a long-standing role in Mandel's life. In 1933, he was expelled from City College of New York at age 16 for protesting ROTC training on campus. He met his wife, Tanya, that same year while protesting a laundry worker's strike in New York City.

Mandel was let go from KPFA in 1995 after 38 years at the station. Mandel says he was fired for violating a gag order and criticizing the station. Others say his show on Russia was no longer relevant at KPFA.

"When the programming changed, his show was canceled," says Philip Maldari, KPFA's public affairs director since 1982.

Still, Maldari says Mandel was one of the more popular hosts in KPFA's history for his informed, outspoken and, at the time, controversial views about the Soviet Union.

Radio scholars agree.

"Bill thought the U.S. had no shortage of people denouncing the Soviet society as the evil empire, and an immoral entity," says Matthew Lasar, who recently completed a book about Pacifica Radio, which owns KPFA.

"He wanted people to understand that the U.S.S.R. was a multicultural society and that the Cold War was not as simple as people were trying to make it."

Mandel was noticed as an expert on Russia in 1940 after writing articles for the little-known American Russian Institute. Mandel landed the job because he could speak and read Russian, which he learned at 14 when his father took the family to Moscow to help "build socialism."

Those who have tracked Mandel's activism over the last several decades say he takes his causes seriously. They're not surprised he is sticking his neck out for Free Radio Berkeley.

"He's not a fanatic," says Marshall Windmiller, professor emeritus of international relations at S.F. State, who first heard Mandel in a 1947 debate on U.S.-Soviet relations while an undergraduate at the University of the Pacific. "His whole life has been crusade on a number of issues, and free speech is definitely one of them. I think he's a guy who says, "I have to keep the faith. I have to to put my body where my mouth is. I'm not going to end my life as a wimp; I never have been one, and I won't now.' " &lt;